For example, an exposure apparatus used in a photolithography process for manufacturing a semiconductor integrated circuit optically reduces and projectively exposes a circuit pattern accurately rendered on a reticle (photomask) used as a mask, onto the photoresist-coated surface of a wafer as a substrate. In the exposure, shortening of an exposure-light wavelength (exposure wavelength) is one of the most simple and effective methods to reduce the minimum pattern size (resolution) on the wafer. Hereinbelow, a description will be made regarding conditions that should be provided to configure an exposure light source, in addition to those for the implementation of the wavelength shortening of the exposure-light.
First, for example, an optical output of several watts is required. The optical output is required to reduce time necessary for exposure and transfer of an integrate circuit pattern and thereby to increase a throughput.
Second, when the exposure light is ultraviolet light having a wavelength of 300 nm or shorter, an optical material which can be used for a reflector member (lens) of a projection optical system is limited, and hence the difficulty increases for compensation of the chromatic aberration. For this reason, monochromaticity of the exposure light is required, and the spectral linewidth needs to be controlled to be about 1 pm or less.
Third, the timelike coherence increases in association with the reduction in the spectral linewidth. As such, when light having a narrow spectral linewidth (wavelength width) is emitted as it is, an unnecessary interference pattern called “speckle” is generated. Therefore, in the exposure light source, the spatial coherence needs to be reduced to suppress generation of the speckles.
One of conventional short-wavelength light sources satisfying these conditions is a light source using an excimer laser in which the laser oscillation wavelength itself is a short wavelength. Another conventional short-wavelength light source is of a type using harmonic waves generation of an infrared or visible-range laser.
A KrF excimer laser (having a wavelength of 248 nm) is used as the above-described former short-wavelength light source. Currently, an exposure light source using a shorter-wavelength ArF excimer laser (having a wavelength of 193 nm) is under development. In addition, a proposal has been made for use of an F2 laser (having a wavelength of 157 nm), which is one of excimer lasers. However, these excimer lasers are of a large scale, and the oscillatory frequency thereof is at about a level of several kHz in a present stage. This requires a per-pulse energy to be increased to increase a per-unit-time radiation energy. This arises various problems. For example, the transmittance of an optical component tends to vary because of so-called compaction and the like, complicated maintenance is required and costs are increased.
As the aforementioned latter method, there is a method that uses a secondary nonlinear optical effect of a nonlinear optical crystal, and thereby converts long wavelength light (infrared light or visible light) into ultraviolet light of short wavelength. For example, a publication (“Longitudinally diode pumped continuous wave 3.5W green laser”, L. Y. Liu, M. Oka, W. Wiechmann and S. Kubota; Optics Letters, vol. 19, p189(1994)) discloses a laser source that performs a wavelength conversion of light emitted from a solid-state laser excited by a semiconductor laser beam. The publication regarding the aforementioned conventional example describes a method of performing a wavelength conversion for a 1,064-nm laser beam generated by an Nd:YAG laser by using a nonlinear optical crystal, and thereby generates light of a 4th-harmonic-wave of 266-nm. The solid-state laser is a generic name of lasers using a solid-state laser medium.
In addition, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 8-334803 and corresponding U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,709 proposed an array laser. The array laser is formed to include a plurality of laser elements in a matrix form (for example, a 10×10 matrix). Each of the laser elements is formed to include a laser-beam generating section including a semiconductor laser, and a wavelength conversion section for performing wavelength conversion for light emitted from the laser-beam generating section into ultraviolet light by using a nonlinear optical crystal.
The conventional array laser thus constituted enables an overall-device light output to be a high output while mitigating light outputs of the individual laser elements to be lower. This enables burden onto the individual nonlinear optical crystals to be lessened. On the other hand, however, since the individual laser elements are independent of one another, to apply the lasers to an exposure apparatus, oscillatory spectra of the overall laser elements need to be set identical with one another at the overall width up to a level of 1 pm.
For the above reason, for example, the length of a resonator of each of the laser elements needs to be adjusted, or a wavelength-selecting device needs to be inserted into the resonator to cause the laser element to autonomously oscillate with the same wavelength in a single longitudinal mode. In this connection, these methods arises other problems. For example, the aforementioned adjustment requires a sensitive arrangement; and in proportion to the increase in the constituent laser elements, the complexity of the configuration needs to be increased to cause the overall devices to oscillate with the same wavelength.
On the other hand, known methods of actively unifying the wavelengths of the plurality of lasers include an injection seed method (for example, see, “Walter Koechner; Solid-state Laser Engineering, 3rd Edition, Springer Series in Optical Science, Vol.1, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-53756-2, pp.246-249”). According to this method, light from a single laser light source having a narrow spectral linewidth is split into a plurality of laser elements, and the laser beams are used as induction waves to tune the individual laser elements, and in addition, to causes the spectral linewidths to be narrow bandwidths. However, the method has problems in that it requires an optical system for separating the seed light into the individual laser elements and an oscillatory-wavelength tuning control section, thereby increase complexity of the configuration.
In addition, the array laser as described above enables the overall device to be significantly smaller than that with the conventional excimer laser, it still causes difficulty in packaging so as to reduce the diameter of overall arrayed output beams to several centimeters or smaller. The array laser thus configured has additional problems. For example, each of the arrays requires the wavelength conversion section, thereby increasing the cost. In addition, suppose misalignment has occurred in a part of the laser elements constituting the array, or damage has occurred with the constituent optical elements. In this case, the overall array needs to be once disassembled, the defective part of the laser elements needs to be taken out for repair, and the array needs to be reassembled after repair.
In view of the above, a primary object of the present invention is to provide a laser device that can be used for a light source of the exposure apparatus, that enables the exposure apparatus to be miniaturized, and that enables the maintainability to be enhanced.
A second object of the present invention is to provide a laser device that enables the oscillatory frequency to be increased, and enables the spatial coherence to be reduced, as well as enabling the overall oscillatory spectral linewidth to be narrowed with a simple configuration.
Additional object of the present invention is to provide an exposing method using such a laser divice as an exposure light source, an exposure apparatus that is compact and that has high flexibility, and an efficient manufacturing method of the aforementioned exposure apparatus.